“So, who else?” I asked.

“What?”

“Who else doesn’t like Michael?”

“Well, there’s Ingrid.”

At the sound of her name, Ingrid reentered the dining area and hung a left for the bar. “What about Ingrid?” she asked.

“You don’t like Michael,” Ginger said.

Ingrid snorted a very ladylike snort—an Audrey Hepburn-like snort—and said, “I like Michael just fine.”

“You do not,” Ginger insisted.

“I’ve liked her from the moment Gretchen introduced us,” Ingrid argued. “What’s not to like? Very smart woman, very charming.”

“She’ll probably wreck your business when the casino opens.”

Ingrid smiled and shook her head at the theory.

“Not going to happen,” she said defiantly.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Several reasons,” she answered, turning her brilliant smile on me. “Want to hear them?”

“Sure.”

“First, for the Ojibwa to operate a casino out of the Kreel County Civic Center, the land the center is built on must first be put into the name of the U.S. government. Then, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the government must put the land in trust for the tribe, making it part of their reservation—and that’s just not going to happen. The issue has been too divisive. Deer Lake is pretty much fifty-fifty on it, and Saginau is the same; that’s what the protests are all about. What politician is going to take up the Ojibwa’s cause knowing he’s going to alienate half of his constituency?”

“That’s what they said about The Forks down the road, and the Ojibwa built that casino,” Ginger reminded Ingrid. But Ingrid ignored her.

“Also,” she continued, “King Koehn is against it, and he carries a lot of weight. You want to get elected in northwestern Wisconsin, you pretty much need his support.”

“Why is King against it?” I asked.

“If he still owned The Harbor, he wouldn’t be,” Ginger suggested.

“You’re probably right,” Ingrid agreed. “He’s not so much against the casino as he’s against Michael. Michael worked with King for a short time, watching over his investments. After a few months she offers to take The Harbor off his hands. He sells. News leaks out about how the Ojibwa might be considering a new casino—”

Ginger rolled her eyes at the word “might.”

“—and King claims he’s been cheated and throws Michael out,” Ingrid continued.

“Was he cheated?” I asked.

“Depends on your interpretation,” Ingrid reasoned. “King claims Michael was his employee and therefore obligated to inform him whenever she learned about a good business opportunity. Michael claims that she was not King’s employee, that she was operating her own business and merely providing a service to King, and was therefore free to seize any opportunity she wished. Me? I’m on Michael’s side.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ginger insisted. “The casino is a done deal.”

“I promise you it is not,” Ingrid told her.

Knowing her boss considerably longer than I, Ginger must have seen signals in Ingrid’s body language that I had missed because she smiled broadly and said, “You know something, don’t you? What?”

“Me?” Ingrid asked. “I’m just a saloonkeeper. What do I know?” Then, to change the subject, she beat a quick riff on the bar top and said, “So, Mr. Taylor. -What brings you back to Deer Lake? Come to see Gretchen?”

“No,” I replied. “Actually, I came to see Michael Bettich.”

“Hmm?”

“You know where I can find her?”

“She used to stay with Gretchen, but I think she moved out,” Ingrid said.

“A few months ago,” Ginger confirmed.

“Where to?”

Neither of them seemed to know. But Ginger had a suggestion.

“Have you tried The Harbor?”

seventeen

The Harbor was all blond wood and glass, surrounded by a gravel parking lot on one side and Lake Peterson on the other; wooden platforms where patrons could dock their boats extended into the water. At the far end of the parking lot were several slots for RVs, each with a bank of water faucets and electrical outlets protruding from the ground. A worn asphalt driveway led past the slots down to the lake, where a sign asked drivers not to block the boat landing with their vehicles. A half dozen pickups and 4X4s were bunched together in the lot.

“Is this it, Alison?” I heard myself ask as I parked my car. “Is this why you faked your death? So you could build a drive-by resort on a mud lake in rural Wisconsin? Is this your dream?”

A moment later I had to duck beneath a plank suspended between two ladders just inside the door. Three men stood on the makeshift scaffold, all of them examining a clump of multicolored wires hanging down from a false ceiling. Another pair was studying a floor duct on the other side of the room. A sixth man was crouched behind the bar, working on a sink, softly humming a country-western tune from the Hank Williams catalog as he fixed a heavy pipe wrench against a fitting.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He turned his head but did not stop working.

“Is Michael Bettich here?”

He shook his head.

“Expect her anytime soon?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“Know where I can find her?”

He shook his head again. “Not my turn to watch her,” he told me, trying to turn the fitting, meeting stubborn resistance.

“It’s important that I find her.”

“Not to me,” he replied, grunting loudly as the fitting slowly turned.

The other workers were equally helpful.

I returned to my car and sat with the door open while listening to the public radio station out of the University of Minnesota-Duluth—the only station I could dial up that played jazz. After two songs I shut the door and fired up the Colt, deciding against waiting for Michael’s return.

“It shouldn’t be this hard, it really shouldn’t,” I muttered.

It wasn’t.

Just as I was about to put my car into gear, a Chevy Blazer cruised into the lot sporting all the paraphernalia of a police vehicle; KREEL COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT and a six-pointed star were stenciled on both doors. It was driven by Deputy Gretchen Rovick. Alison Donnerbauer Emerton was her passenger. She had changed the color of her hair from brown to a deep auburn—women have always found it easier to change their appearance than men—but even through the windshield, her blue-green eyes were undisguisable.

I stepped out of my car as the vehicle stopped. Gretchen took a hard look at me. She clearly didn’t like what she saw.

“What?” Alison asked. I couldn’t hear her, but it was easy enough to read her lips through the glass.

“Taylor,” Gretchen answered.

Alison seemed genuinely surprised that I had found her.

I waited until they exited the vehicle.

“Good morning, Deputy,” I said to Gretchen. She didn’t reply. I turned to the other woman. Ginger had been right. She was much prettier in person. “Alison Donnerbauer Emerton, I presume. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

Alison smiled slightly. “I must have screwed up.”

I told her where. She tapped her forehead with the fingers of her right hand as if to punish herself for her carelessness. “I’d forgotten I told Marie about the name Rosalind Colletti,” she confessed.

“We all make mistakes.”

“And this one is going to cost me, isn’t it? How much?”

A bribe? I thought it was beneath her and told her so. “Besides, I’m already being well paid.”

“What then? What will make you go away?”

“Tell me why, that’s all. Tell me why you went to all the trouble.” I was desperate to hear her explanation, and it probably showed.

She smiled at me; it was a superior smile. “It’s a long story, and quite frankly I see no reason to share it with you.”

Gretchen chuckled. She was leaning on the front fender of her Blazer, watching us.

“I could make your life difficult,” I told Alison.

She smiled some more. A threat? She thought it was beneath me and told me so.